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Hillary the Progressive?

Clinton also has to overcome the lingering perception that, as senator from New York and more recently as a speechmaker and principal of the Clinton Foundation, she’s too close to the Wall Street banks to take them on. Just after her New America Foundation speech, noted David Corn of liberal Mother Jones magazine, the Clinton Foundation planned to hold a daylong conference at the Manhattan headquarters of Goldman Sachs. Since resigning as secretary of state, Clinton has also given two speeches to Goldman Sachs audiences, presumably at her standard fee of $200,000 a pop (a sum so vast that, as ABC interviewer Diane Sawyer said Monday, it is several times the median U.S. income). “Bill and Hillary Clinton have always nurtured cozy ties with Wall Street—in terms of policies and funds-chasing (for their campaigns and the foundation),” Corn wrote.

As former President Clinton has done, distancing himself occasionally from the deregulatory decisions pushed by his once-popular former Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, his wife will no doubt move to free herself of Wall Street’s baleful gravity (don’t expect any more speeches at Goldman, for one thing). But she’ll need to do much more. Like her husband the former president, Hillary has a tendency to hark back to the supposed halcyon days of the late 1990s, when “a rising tide really did lift all boats,” as she said in her recent speech. She also frankly endorsed Bill Clinton’s policies, saying: “Twenty-three million new jobs were created. Raising the minimum wage, doubling the earned-income tax credit—that helped millions of lower-income families climb out of poverty for the first time. The Children’s Health Insurance Program changed millions of young lives. And on and on, all with a balanced budget that resulted in surpluses as far as the eye could see.” But sadly, Clinton concluded, the “new administration” in 2000 made “different choices.”

Shades of Obama. The president’s governing stock in trade over the past six years has been to blame most of his problems on George W. Bush’s mistakes. Judging from the polls, that tack isn’t working for him anymore. Harking back to the ‘90s (I mean, how many people can even recall the ‘90s?) is not likely to be enough either. Jared Bernstein, Vice President Joe Biden’s former chief economist, says that the problem of inequality has grown so dire that a successful candidate for president is going to have to lay out a new vision for American government entirely. “If you’re in the top 1 percent or top 10th of the top 1 percent, you think a lot of institutions are set up to help you: Congress, the international trade structure, tax law, financial markets. Everybody’s got your back. But if you’re in a median household you don’t feel that way.” Bernstein says that whoever the leading candidate is in 2016, he or she is going to have to come up with a broad, detailed plan for redirecting American government to support the middle class. Otherwise, he says, “you’re not going to get much traction.”

Clinton has a long way to go before she gets any. In another TV interview Tuesday morning, obviously a little abashed by her “dead broke” comments the night before, she sought to “clarify that I fully appreciate how hard life is for so many Americans today.” But it’s been seven years since she last spoke out on these issues, which are going to be front and center for most voters in 2016. And it shows.